rackconnect

Rackspace has long been at the forefront of innovation, including our initial launch of RackConnect in 2011. Originally built as a one-off request to help power one customer’s environment, RackConnect, has grown up to be the backbone of our hybrid cloud by connecting your dedicated environment to your cloud environment. What many people don’t know is that RackConnect is built on top of the .NET Framework.

This is a guest post written and contributed by Steve Girolami, vice president of engineering at AfterCollege, a Rackspace Hybrid Cloud customer. AfterCollege is a career network that connects college students, alumni and employers through faculty and career networks at colleges and universities.

This is a guest post written and contributed by Steve Vitale, Director of Ecommerce for Spencer’s, a Rackspace Hybrid Cloud customer. Spencer’s is a lifestyle retail company that operates two unique, national brands, Spencer’s and Spirit Halloween, throughout the United States, Canada and online.

This is a guest post written and contributed by James Crowley, co-founder and CTO at FundApps, a Rackspace Hybrid Cloud customer that brings cloud based compliance and risk monitoring to the fund industry.

This is a guest post written and contributed by Sunny Dhillon, Technical Operations Manager at Coastal.com, a Rackspace Hybrid Cloud customer and the largest online retailer of eyeglasses and contact lenses in North America.

We often say that the cloud is for everyone, but not for everything. Between social networks, mobile apps and entertainment, we all use some type of cloud-based service. However, SaaS operators who are anxious to move off of legacy hardware and on to the cloud may find that due to regulatory or industry constraints, parts of their architecture must remain in a dedicated environment. For example, a finance-related service could run its website front end, file storage and test/dev in the cloud, but due to federal regulations, it could be unable to move sensitive customer databases or shopping cart functions to the public cloud. This is a hurdle that prevents many businesses from adopting any type of cloud asset.

This post is part one of a two-part series that examines hybrid hosting, use cases and questions you should ask when considering a hybrid hosting environment. Stay tuned for part two, which will run November 14. For more detailed information on hybrid hosting check out the white paper “Nervous About Cloud? Go Hybrid Instead.”

So far in this blog series, we’ve talked about Hybrid Clouds, some of the benefits that Hybrid architectures can bring to a cloud solution and how these benefits can be realized at Rackspace by using RackConnect™. Last week, we zoomed in on the flexibility hybrid can bring to a small business that may be budget constrained, but still needs to grow at the same time.